Pricing Your Resale Home

Are you looking to sell, now that spring fever is starting to hit in your area? How do you price your home well?

Pricing resale property is an art form in many cases. In the pricing game, new home builders probably have the easiest time of it because everything is new. There are no signs of wear, no smells from cigarettes or pets. With resale homes, your best bet to sell quickly and happily is to price it correctly. The challenge for you is that you want as much as the last sale; but don't bet on it. The market has changed in the past 12 months, and in some areas, prices are flat if not falling. You could still walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gain, but maybe not the most you hoped for.

Thus, the trick to pricing your home. The most popular model is to price your home comparably with comparable properties. If there are homes selling in your area that are comparable, yours is a fairly easy job.

What if your home is the first of its kind for sale on the block? Then, you can go to another way of comparing: you can compare features and major components of your home to other homes which have these same features and components. Have 4 bedrooms? What are 4 bedroom homes selling for? Have an inground pool? Look at other homes with pools and see what the premium is for a pool. If you have a finished basement, you should also look at the premium that homes with finished basements get.

There are other more complicated ways of pricing, but in most cases, people will tend to use one of these two methods. If you need more help in pricing, a real estate agent can help as a 'sanity check'.